Star Trek: Every Captain Ranked Worst To Best (2023)

James Kirk's name is well-known throughout the Federation. His historic five-year mission aboard the Enterprise NCC 1701 brought him into contact with many new alien cultures and unexplained phenomena.

Kirk later became an Admiral, serving as Chief Of Starfleet Operations before returning to the Enterprise. After saving Earth from the Whale Probe in Star Trek IV, Kirk was demoted back to the rank of Captain for disobeying the orders of a superior officer. He went on to save the Federation President from assassination in Star Trek VI, which allowed the Khitomer Conference to go forward, ushering in a new era of peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

Although he was one of the most famous Starfleet captains of all time, he had a few flaws that keep him from being the greatest. He was impulsive, he treated his orders more like suggestions, and his away missions had an exceptionally high mortality rate for red shirts. He also loved to ignore the temporal prime directive and any other laws governing time travel. According to the Federation's Department Of Temporal Investigations, Kirk amassed more temporal violations than anyone else on file, with a total of seventeen separate incidents. Though, Kirk's biggest mistake was probably leaving Khan and his fellow Augments on the planet Ceti Alpha V. No one from Starfleet noticed when the planet became uninhabitable, and the Augments were driven mad with a lust for revenge. Kirk surely went on to regret this mistake.